Hi everyone,
As you can see in my signature, I'm the co-founder of the music blog The Somber Lane, an amateur blog devoted to promote emergent and underground music from all around the world. We try to cover the broadest arrange of styles we can, everything's accepted.

We usually deal with reviews, interviews, news and all kinds of music-related extra columns (music discussion, music business pills, etc.).

After about a year of work, we would like to step up our activity and expand the blog, so to bring greater support to artists we will be hosting we first need support ourselves. Having all the work on two people is hard! That&#8217;s why we are officially looking for external contributors.So who are we looking for?

What we expect from a contributor is the following:
&#8226; Good English skills and quick translation capabilities, if not mother tongue (we won&#8217;t accept non English speaking contributors leaving translations on us)
&#8226; The availability of a minimum amount of time reserved to keep communications, the blog&#8217;s internal management will still lie on us
&#8226; Managing mail communications and clouds such as Google Drive
&#8226; A great passion for the broadest musical styles as possible, so to form a solid and motivated personal opinion in reviews. If you&#8217;re a musician, that&#8217;s clearly a plus.
&#8226; The capability to stay updated with music news, find and evaluate new material to be published and be written about. Again, remember it&#8217;s not all about interviews and reviews.
&#8226; Enough creativity and imagination to write entertaining articles! (Possibly better than those we write ourselves haha)
&#8226; Above all, a general sense of commitment and accountability! It&#8217;s a blog but also a very small business after all, and we need to keep a sense of professionality.

We can&#8217;t bring you any retribution, for the time being at least, but you&#8217;ll have access to tons of new music and get to know tons of people.
If you&#8217;d like the experience and can prove enough commitment to it, we invite you to reach us at our email providing a sample review written by yourself. Hit us up first and we&#8217;ll provide a template.

I got a blog focused on stoner/heavy/psych/doom in Italy so I know what you're looking for and I know it's a hard work.
But is also satisfactory: when you get positive feedbacks from people and bands, when you enter for free at concerts....

After about a year of work, we would like to step up our activity and expand the blog, so to bring greater support to artists we will be hosting we first need support ourselves. Having all the work on two people is hard!

Rizzo

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So instead of working harder to create a good blog and following, you want other people to write your material for free? That's not how things work dude.

I got a blog focused on stoner/heavy/psych/doom in Italy so I know what you're looking for and I know it's a hard work.
But is also satisfactory: when you get positive feedbacks from people and bands, when you enter for free at concerts....

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Thanks Fraz.
Yeah it is, we had a lot of satisfactions already in not yet a year of activity, still it's harder and harder to keep it up and have a constant output by two people only. Not to mention creating some actual value for people.

I speak from my experience: write "for free" it means to have free cd's (from who still sends promotional cd's...) and go for free to the concert to revivew.
I dind't find it so bad... plus... I think nobody here (in Italy) takes money from reviews in small magazines or websites

So instead of working harder to create a good blog and following, you want other people to write your material for free? That's not how things work dude.

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Well, working harder would mean spending more time working on the blog personally (which doens't just end up as "writing stuff", you know) and that's exactly what I can't do for the moment. I am a student and my free time is what it is. I can't just turn it into a job (also since it brings zero income).

That's why I am just looking for collaborators.
You'll notice blogs have lots of writers to thrive.
One can't just work at a (sort of) business on its own, without a team. And we all have to start somewhere.

I "work" for free too, I don't have any income (no ads, anything on the blog) and I don't receive anything for what I do (we don't request CDs, gig passes or anything). It's really just my passion and my will to help others in exchange for nothing. Which is not much sustainable in the long run.

For the moment, what I am able to do is just credit the other writers and give some visibility to their personal "business" if they have one (may it be a band, label, or anything).

There's really nothing shady in my request nor I have anything to hide, I'm just looking for people who would collaborate in what I am doing and make it more sustainable, and hopefully we'll be able to turn it into something greater along the way.
Lots of blogs just search for writers in this same way.